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The new series of Jülich Lectures at Forschungszentrum Jülich was inaugurated by Stephen S. Pawlowski, Senior Fellow and General Manager, Datacenter and Connected Systems Pathfinding, Intel, in February 2012. He spoke about the grand technological challenges and long-term strategies involved in developing the next generation of supercomputers.

Today, the fastest supercomputers perform about 10^15 arithmetic operations per second and are thus described as petascale systems. However, developers and scientists from supercomputing centres and industry are already planning the route to exascale systems, which are about one thousand times faster than present supercomputers. In order to achieve this kind of performance, amongst other aspects, several million processor cores have to be synchronized and new storage technologies developed. The reliability of the components must be guaranteed and a key factor is the reduction of energy consumption.